The present invention relates to a collectorless direct current motor equipped with a fan or for driving a fan and including a permanent magnet rotor in the field of at least one stator winding and to a method of operating such a motor. In particular, the invention relates to a driver circuit for a collectorless direct current motor including a permanent magnet rotor having at least two poles and at least one stator winding connected to the driver circuit end stage which temorarily operates as a switch and a sensor detecting the position of the rotor, with the control signal fed to the end stage during each commutation phase causing the current in the stator winding to have a ramp-shaped configuration.
Such a driver circuit is disclosed in No. DE-OS 3,107,623 and includes an RC member with the aid of which rectangular signals are reshaped to control the direct current motor in order to reduce the steepness of their edges, thus reducing the winding noise of the motor. However, in the known driver circuit, there exists neither a possibility to change the number of revolutions nor a possibility to regulate the number of revolutions as a function of an external physical value independently of the operating voltage.
It is known to detect the position of the rotor by means of at least one galvanomagnetic element, a Hall generator or the like, and to use the signal generated in this element, which is a function of the rotor position, to control, by way of semiconductor elements, the currents in one or a plurality of stator windings.
The control circuits employed for this purpose are supplemented by members which regulate the number of revolutions as a function of externally detectable physical values with an otherwise constant operating voltage. Regulation of the number of revolutions may be controlled as a function of various parameters or it may involve an adjustment of the number of revolutions of a fan driving motor which provides ventilation that is automatically adapted to demands for a stream of air. In this case, the fan may be part of a device to be cooled which heats up to different temperatures and whose heat is to be dissipated by the fan. In that case, the heat to be dissipated would be the external physical command variable which determines the regulation of the number of revolutions.
Not only for this exemplary case of use but quite generally, users or manufacturers of such direct current drives desire to make available the smallest possible motors for their space-saving advantages. Power losses should be kept low.
To vary the output of motors operated with a constant operating voltage, it is known to pulse width modulate the motor current. In this case, a low pulse frequency in the audible frequency range is selected. Such a frequency does not produce much additional power loss and does not radiate much interference onto adjacent devices, but it does have the drawback of developing a considerable amount of additional noise. Therefore it is also known to select a high pulse frequency in order to reduce noise. Then, stray high frequency fields result which interfere with the devices with which the fans and the corresponding direct current drives are associated. The simplest regulation employs a rough turn-on and turn-off range with the drawback of restless, rumbling motor operation. The demand for small structures gives rise to the additional desire to integrate the components employed in the circuits and to combine them in a chip. Therefore, the power losses in the integrated active and passive components employed must be kept low so that the components can be placed in close, juxtaposition and encapsulated. This demand is counter to the necessity of allowing sufficient current to flow in the electromagnetic peaks then occur in the control circuits and the heat generated by these peaks must not be permitted to destroy the integrated electronic components.